Friends, family, faculty, and staff filled Barton Hall to cheer on members of the newest class to join the ranks of Bowers CIS alumni, as the students traversed the stage at three recognition ceremonies held May 26, by the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.

More than 1,100 undergraduate, master's, and Ph.D. students received degrees this week, after completing their education in August 2022, December 2022, or May 2023. This year, undergraduates from Cornell Bowers CIS made up about 20% of Cornell's 2023 graduating class. 

In her opening remarks at the information science and computer science ceremonies, Kavita Bala, dean of Cornell Bowers CIS, recounted the remarkable history of the college. Bala recalled that 24 years ago, Cornell was a pioneer in creating the faculty of computing and information science, "envisioning multiple fields of the information age together under one banner: computer science, information science, and statistics and data science." She urged the new alumni to take that innovative history with them as they embark on their careers.

"Regardless of where your path takes you — industry, graduate studies, academia, or entrepreneurship — I encourage you to take a page from our college’s history by taking risks and looking out for any opportunity to explore uncharted waters," she said.

Statistics and Data Science

In his remarks at the Department of Statistics and Data Science ceremony, Martin Wells, the Charles A. Alexander Professor of Statistical Sciences, encouraged the more than 100 graduates in attendance to take what they have learned at Cornell and apply it to have a positive impact on the world.

"As ambassadors of statistical science, your skills will influence how our data-driven society responds to current and future challenges," said Wells. "As you step into the next chapter of your lives, remember to embrace new challenges, continue learning, and pursue your passions…May you revel in your search for clarity, understanding, and truth."

Information Science

“The world really needs you,” said David Williamson, chair of information science and professor in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering, in his remarks. “We need people who can think about the effects of technologies before they get built, rather than after the fact. We need people who think critically about technology to know how it actually works, so that the critique can have a real impact. … I think your choice to major in information science will serve you and all of us very well in the years to come.”

Jeff Rzeszotarski, assistant professor of information science, was the faculty speaker selected by the graduating class. With a penchant for big numbers, Rzeszotarski encouraged the roughly 300 information science graduates to consider the estimated 10,000 hours they each put in to earn their diploma – about 2 million hours total.

“I call out these numbers because it's often tempting for students to focus only on the final grades that show up on a transcript,” said Rzeszotarski. “While today, we celebrate your graduation and earning your diploma, don't lose sight of all the sheer effort you had to put forth to get to this transition point.” 

He characterized information science as a field that examines how technology merges with different aspects of our world – from communication and law to art and social change – to form an interconnected, complex web that shapes society. He urged students to find connections or areas of inquiry in the world to apply their Cornell education.

“Identify where your knowledge transfers in new fields. See unexpected relationships between domains. Find these connection points in the next phase of your life,” he said. “These connections will help you solve problems in ways no one else can.” 

Computer Science

In the last and largest event of the day, the Department of Computer Science recognized more than 700 undergraduate and graduate students, many who were cheered on by supporters with banners, face cutouts, and noisemakers.

Éva Tardos, the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Computer Science and department chair, recognized the difficulty of attending college during the COVID-19 pandemic, and congratulated the students on overcoming these challenges.

"I hope you will go after the many great opportunities that our professional industry offers you," said Tardos. "This is a truly exciting time to be a computer scientist." She also urged the graduates to be thoughtful in their career pursuits, taking into account issues of privacy, accountability, and fairness. 

In closing, Tardos encouraged the new graduates to come back and visit and to stay in touch with the faculty. "I hope to personally hear from every one of you what your next adventure is," she said. "All 700 of you!" 

By Lou DiPietro and Patricia Waldron, both writers for the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.

An experiment in which two people play a modified version of Tetris – the 40-year-old block-stacking video game – revealed that players who get fewer turns perceive the other player as less likable, regardless of whether a person or an algorithm allocates the turns.

“We expected that people working in a team would care if they are treated unfairly by another human or an AI,” said Malte Jung, associate professor of information science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, whose group conducted the study.

Most studies on algorithmic fairness focus on the algorithm or the decision itself, but Jung sought to explore the relationships among the people affected by the decisions.

“We are starting to see a lot of situations in which AI makes decisions on how resources should be distributed among people,” Jung said. “We want to understand how that influences the way people perceive one another and behave towards each other. We see more and more evidence that machines mess with the way we interact with each other.”

Houston B. Claure, M.S. ’20, Ph.D. ’23, is first author of “The Social Consequences of Machine Allocation Behavior: Fairness, Interpersonal Perceptions and Performance,” published April 27 in Computers in Human Behavior. Claure earned his master’s and doctorate in mechanical engineering, minoring in computer science.

Jung and Claure conducted an earlier study in which a robot chose which person to give a block to, and studied the reactions of each individual to the machine’s allocation decisions.

“We noticed that every time the robot seemed to prefer one person, the other one got upset,” said Jung, director of the Robots in Groups Lab. “We wanted to study this further, because we thought that, as machines making decisions becomes more a part of the world – whether it be a robot or an algorithm – how does that make a person feel?”

Because of the time it took to conduct experiments and analyze data using a physical robot, Jung and Claure felt there was a better and more efficient way to study this effect. That’s when Tetris – originally released in 1984, and long a useful tool for researchers looking to gain fundamental insights about human cognition, social behavior and memory – entered the picture.

“When it comes to allocating resources,” Claure said, “it turns out Tetris isn’t just a game – it’s a powerful tool for gaining insights into the complex relationship between resource allocation, performance and social dynamics.”

Using open-source software, Claure – now a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University – developed a two-player version of Tetris, in which players manipulate falling geometric blocks in order to stack them without leaving gaps before the blocks pile to the top of the screen. Claure’s version, Co-Tetris, allows two people (one at a time) to work together to complete each round.

An “allocator” – either human or AI, which was conveyed to the players – determines which player takes each turn. Jung and Claure devised their experiment so that players would have either 90% of the turns (the “more” condition), 10% (“less”) or 50% (“equal”).

The researchers found, predictably, that those who received fewer turns were acutely aware that their partner got significantly more. But they were surprised to find that feelings about it were largely the same regardless of whether a human or an AI was doing the allocating.

One particularly interesting finding: When the allocation was done by an AI , the player receiving more turns saw their partner as less dominant, but when the allocation was done by a human, perceptions of dominance weren’t affected.

The effect of these decisions is what the researchers have termed “machine allocation behavior” – similar to the established phenomenon of “resource allocation behavior,” the observable behavior people exhibit based on allocation decisions. Jung said machine allocation behavior is “the concept that there is this unique behavior that results from a machine making a decision about how something gets allocated.”

The researchers also found that fairness didn’t automatically lead to better game play and performance. In fact, equal allocation of turns led, on average, to a worse score than unequal allocation.

“If a strong player receives most of the blocks,” Claure said, “the team is going to do better. And if one person gets 90%, eventually they’ll get better at it than if two average players split the blocks.”

Rene Kizilcec, assistant professor of information science (Cornell Bowers CIS) and a co-author of the study, hopes this work leads to more research on the effects of AI decisions on people – particularly in scenarios where AI systems make continuous decisions, and not just one-off choices.

“AI tools such as ChatGPT are increasingly embedded in our everyday lives, where people develop relationships with these tools over time,” Kizilcec said, “how, for instance, teachers, students, and parents think about the competence and fairness of an AI tutor based on their interactions over weeks and months matters a great deal.”

The other co-author is Seyun Kim ’19, M.S. ’21, a doctoral student in human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University.

The work was supported by the National Science Foundation.

By Tom Fleischman, Cornell Chronicle

This story was originally published in the Cornell Chronicle.

For Zachary Schecter ‘23, it was winning the Most Innovative Game award at the Game Design Showcase his sophomore year that really clinched it: he would become a professional game developer. He watched showcase attendees play his team’s game, Sisyphus, where the mythological main character swings his boulder through 40 levels – from the underworld up to Mount Olympus – and the judges deemed it the best.

“It was a defining moment,” Schecter said. He thought, “I want to do this. I want to do this for a living.”

A longtime gamer, Schecter had considered game design as a career, but the computer science major didn’t know how to make that happen until he discovered the Game Design Initiative at Cornell (GDIAC) program. “It literally changed my life,” he said. “It gave me everything I needed to understand how to make a game and also showed me what the real experience was like.”

Founded in 2001, GDIAC was the first undergraduate game design program at an Ivy League school and one of the first in the country. Students can declare game design as a minor, and Princeton Review lists it among the top 50 game design programs for undergrads.

For many GDIAC students, the showcase is when a passion for game design crystallizes into a career plan – all that hard work rewarded by the intoxicating rush of someone entranced by a game you created.

This year, the showcase was held May 20 in Clark Atrium in the Physical Sciences Building, with almost 600 visitors. According to vote counts, the crowd favorites were the desktop game Munchkey, where a monkey chef defeats dangerous fruit to make fruit skewers, and the mobile game Sunk Cost, a multiplayer stealth game where players are either treasure hunters exploring an underwater shipwreck or spirits trying to thwart them. 

“There are a lot of flashy game design programs out there, but we hit above our weight for the resources that we have,” said Walker White, M.S. ’98, Ph.D. ’00, director of GDIAC and senior lecturer in the Department of Computer Science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. 

Despite being a highly competitive field, alumni of the program can be found at all levels of the industry, from AAA companies like PlayStation and Oculus VR, to successful indie teams with breakout hits. Not bad for a minor. 

Level 1: Origin story

GDIAC originated in the mind of David Schwartz, who was hired as a lecturer in 1999, and is now the director of the School of Interactive Games and Media at Rochester Institute of Technology. His background was in civil engineering, but he had written two textbooks on engineering software while completing his dissertation.

Schwartz admits he didn’t know much about computer science when he arrived, but after a colloquium by Don Greenberg, the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Computer Graphics, where Greenberg used familiar physics terms to discuss his computer graphics work, Schwartz realized game physics could be a potential area of study. As the faculty advisor for Cornell's Association of Computer Science Undergraduates (ACSU), Schwarz proposed that, instead of playing games, students could learn to design games of their own.

“I thought the students would find this very motivating," Schwartz said. "Just imagine the passion they would have to make these things.” 

While the Department of Computer Science did not yet consider video games to be an academic subject, Charlie van Loan, professor emeritus of computer science and the chair at the time, agreed Schwartz could offer an independent study – but on his own time.

In 2001, Schwartz recruited Rama Hoetzlein ’01, who had dual degrees in computer science and art, and is now an assistant professor of digital media design at Florida Gulf Coast University. He also hired Mohan Rajagopalan M.S. ’02, who later left for the game industry, working on Plants vs Zombies, among other titles. 

The trio founded the program and developed the first classes, making connections in the departments of art, music and communication to help students enhance those aspects in their games. Early funding came from a seed grant from Microsoft, a donation from a trustee, and funds earmarked for Uris Library to design a computer lab, which ultimately became the Cornell Library Collaborative Learning Computer Lab.

Schwartz and Rajagopalan finally got permission to establish game design as a minor in 2007, when only a handful of schools were offering undergraduate courses in game design. “Cornell was actually part of the first wave,” Schwartz said. He estimates that almost one-third of computer science majors at the time took his game design course. 

Level 2: Training grounds

In 2007, White became the program director. He had started designing games as part of a club in his dorm room at Dartmouth, and had recently published research on how database technology could be leveraged to advanced game design, which enhanced the initiative's academic legitimacy. White envisioned GDIAC as an applied software engineering course for sophomores, where the application just happened to be games.

White runs his introductory and advanced game development courses as studio classes, with students constantly presenting and critiquing each other’s games. Twelve teams of eight – a mix of artists, programmers and a musician – function like an indie game company to produce all or part of a game for the annual showcase. Students not only learn sound design, computer graphics, and software engineering but also the critical art of project management. 

While the professional tools for creating games have steadily improved in recent years, the students still build parts of their games from scratch – a decision that White said sets GDIAC apart from other programs. “I'm an educator, and I believe in teaching foundational, portable skills,” White said. “I want them seeing how everything fits together.”

In addition to the showcase, students have frequently competed in juried festivals, such as the Boston Festival of Indie Games, but mainly before the COVID-19 pandemic. The program’s biggest breakout hit was the mobile game Family Style – a party game where players pass ingredients between phones to assemble dishes. In 2019, the game was featured on the front page of the Apple store, went viral in Thailand, and reached a peak of 15,000 daily active players, White said.

But despite the preparation GDIAC provides, game development is still a tough field, with stiff competition for jobs, grinding hours, and frequent layoffs. “I love supporting my students who want to go into the game industry, but I don't sugarcoat it,” White said. He sends five or six graduates off to the game industry each year, while 15 to 20 others go on to work in game-related tech. “I make sure people are going in wide-eyed, because they're hopefully in it for the long haul.”

Level 3: Achievements unlocked

Developing video games may seem like child’s play, but it’s a big business. The Entertainment Software Association reports the U.S. spent $56.6 billion on video games in 2022; worldwide, the market was estimated to be worth $214.2 billion. About two-thirds of people in the U.S. play video games at least once a week, and the industry employed more than 400,000 people in 2020.

“It's definitely a challenging industry; the bar is generally really high,” said Rajiv Puvvada '10, an early graduate of the program and industry veteran who has worked at top companies, including Zynga, Juicebox Games, and AWS for Games. Especially for entry-level positions, “there are only so many of those spots that come around,” he said.

Puvvada can’t remember a time when he wasn’t gaming; there are photos of him reaching for a Nintendo controller from his high chair. He started making games as a teenager, “going about things in the entirely wrong way,” but he felt the stigma that game development wasn’t a “real” job. Through GDIAC, he discovered a path to the career he wanted. 

Working in a multi-disciplinary team with deadlines at Cornell was excellent preparation for the real thing, he said, and learning the fundamentals has helped him stay agile as gaming technology evolves. “The game industry field is very wide, and it changes a lot, often very quickly,” he said.

Puvvada said he’s always happy to talk with current students and help them enter the industry and grow their career. He thinks this is vital for “increasing the level of diversity in the industry, because that's something that benefits all of us.”

There are no cheat codes for breaking into the industry, but recent graduate Kristina Gu '21, M.Eng '22, said after multiple attempts, she felt fortunate to have landed an internship at PlayStation. Thanks to a good word put in by her internship supervisor, Gu is now a technical designer at Naughty Dog, an affiliated company behind the critically acclaimed game The Last of Us.

GDIAC made her well-rounded, which makes her a more flexible game designer, she said. “Game development is really one of the only fields that has that perfect balance of being interdisciplinary, technical and creative, which is something I really, really enjoy.” 

A long-time gamer, Gu became captivated by game design while playing Uncharted 4, another Naughty Dog title, in high school. She’s been a rabid fan since.

Even Gu’s parents are largely happy with where she’s at. “My dad is still holding out hope that maybe I’ll go back to business school, but I think they’re pretty happy with how it’s gone,” she said. 

The End: And another quest begins

After graduation, Schecter will be the latest GDIAC alum to join the game industry, with a position developing graphics at Blizzard Entertainment. He interned at the company in 2022 after being selected from a pool of about 20,000-30,000 applicants.

“I love Blizzard games. I actually run the Overwatch team at Esports at Cornell, which is a Blizzard title,” he said. “I’m sure that helped.”

Schecter will once again descend to the underworld to work on Diablo 4, the fourth installment of their popular Diablo series – a set of dungeon crawler games, where players contend with hordes of demons.

Soon, Schecter’s games will not only be played by hundreds of people at the game design showcase, but will captivate millions of people around the world.

Patricia Waldron is a writer for the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.

As part of the largest graduating class in the history of the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, a few graduates in the Class of 2023 shared reflections on their undergraduate years. With varied accomplishments at Cornell, their wide-ranging educational initiatives embody their ingenuity and perseverance.

Ishika Agrawal 

What have you accomplished as a Cornell student that you are most proud of, either inside the classroom or otherwise?

I’m most proud of Pavvilion, a startup I launched with my peers, Nina, Max, Lizzie, Meredith and Noah. Starting within the Cornell Tech Policy Lab, it's been an incredible journey from the initial sketches to figuring out what it takes to build an app to conducting user interviews and testing to finally launching this past semester and getting 300 users. Taking this leap into the world of entrepreneurship has taught me so many valuable lessons about balancing user and business goals, legal questions about privacy and security, selling our idea to users and investors and putting myself out there to start something completely from scratch.

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Sydney Bednar 

What was your favorite class and why?

I took INFO 3450: Human-Computer-Interaction Design with Prof. Gilly Leshed, and it was my first exposure to user-centered design. We spent the semester learning about design principles and ethics and then applying that to our own semester-long group projects where we were tasked with designing a technology that solves a social problem. My group created an application to help people quit vaping. This project required us to conduct user interviews, as well as complete other outside research before settling on a design, which helped ensure that we properly responded to user needs. I loved this class because it was challenging but also very applicable. The skills I gained over the course of that semester have been incredibly useful in my job as a product designer, as well as in many of my other classes at Cornell.

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Jeremy Jung 

Who or what influenced your Cornell education the most? How or why?

I still vividly remember the moment in office hours for Numerical Analysis, where I was having a one-on-one conversation with Professor Alexander Vladimirsky. I was confiding to him about how I found the material very difficult and felt insecure that I was asking too many clarifying questions during class. In response, he told me that asking questions takes courage — a lot of others have the same questions but don’t have the willingness to speak up. He then encouraged me to ask even more questions, as they helped not just me, but the entire class. It was at this moment that I realized that learning only happens when I remove my fear of judgment. Only when I am vulnerable can I be fully receptive to learning everything the world has to offer.

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Hal Reed 

Why did you choose Cornell?

When I was figuring out which schools to apply to, I had the goal of studying computer science in the context of humanities frameworks; I had a lot of curiosity about computing and enjoyed building technological skills, but I also wanted to continue practicing my passions for media and history. The fact that Cornell offered a CS major in Arts & Sciences connected deeply with me, and I was even further excited by the Milstein Program in Technology & Humanities and their goals to pursue the same intersections I valued. Looking back, I am grateful for whatever wisdom my 17-year-old self had: the fact that my path evolved from CS to information science and history has shown me the importance of faculty and structures that promote academic exploration.

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Lirong Yao

Where do you dream to be in 10 years?

I dream of working as a research scientist on cutting-edge technology to build real artificial intelligence machines. This has been my long-standing ambition even before I started studying at Cornell. Pursuing a computer science degree here has been a step toward achieving that goal.

Since its first iteration in Spring 2019, the Cornell Information Science student project showcase has blossomed into a can’t-miss event at the end of every semester, featuring a panoply of innovation in user experience design and research, robotic prototypes, app design, and much more.

More than 40 student teams gathered in Baker Atrium in the Physical Sciences Building on Thursday, May 11, for the Spring 2023 showcase. They represented three Information Science courses: “Introduction to Rapid Prototyping and Physical Computing,” “Qualitative User Research and Design Methods,” and “App Design and Prototyping.”

Below is a sampling of the projects:

INFO 4320/5321: Introduction to Rapid Prototyping and Physical Computing

Instructor: Cheng Zhang, assistant professor of information science

INFO 4320 challenges students to build robotic prototypes using techniques like laser cutting, 3D printing, and microcontroller programming. The final projects do not disappoint. From an M&M Launcher and Piano Painter to a Lego sorter and Beer Pong Robot, students take skills learned in the classroom and mix in creativity and fun to build interactive, working prototypes for classmates to test at the event. This semester, 16 teams presented projects like a watercolor painter, robotic chess game, and a sand mandala generator.

Anchey Peng ’24, Luke Murphy ’23, and Sarah Shin MPS ’23 built a beautiful electronic pinball machine using three ESP 32s – a low-cost microcontroller – and 3D-printed components.

Dance through a rowdy house party, fight off dangerous fruit, and pull a fast one on a bubble gum cartel at the Game Design Initiative at Cornell (GDIAC) showcase, held Saturday, May 20 from 1-4 p.m. in Clark Atrium in the Physical Sciences Building.

The event allows students in the CIS 3152 Intro to Game Development and CIS 4152 Advanced Game Development courses to show off their final projects. Members of the general public are invited to play the games and vote for their favorites. At the end of the showcase, the most popular games will receive awards.

“The student teams have created some especially innovative titles this year with impressive graphics and unusual game mechanics,” said Walker White, M.S. ’98, Ph.D. ’00, senior lecturer, Stephen H. Weiss Provost’s Teaching Fellow and GDIAC director in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.

For example, the showcase will feature Reharmonia, the first mobile “strand game,” a genre where players deliver cargo between isolated locations. In Reharmonia, players must balance an unwieldy backpack as they travel across an unpredictable landscape. In another game, Pivot, players explore a 3D world, viewing it through constantly shifting 2D cross-sections.

A total of 21 PC and mobile games will be available to play. More information about the showcase can be found here. 

By Patricia Waldron, a writer for the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.

The Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science awarded 10 faculty members annual excellence awards for the 2022-2023 academic year.

Five were honored for exceptional research, and another five were honored for teaching and advising excellence during a reception held Friday, May 12, in Willard Straight Hall.

Ann S. Bowers ’59 Research Awards

Nate Foster, interim associate dean for research, presented the Ann S. Bowers ’59 Research Excellence Awards to the following faculty. The award recognizes scholars, their research contributions, and reputation in and impact on their respective fields.

Nicki Dell is an associate professor of information science at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and in Cornell Bowers CIS. Dell develops technology oriented toward social impact, improving the lives of underserved communities around the world. She has done work at the intersection of health and technology, with projects that seek to strengthen community health programs in low-income areas and provide useful technology for home health workers. More recently, she and her collaborators created the Clinic to End Tech Abuse (CETA), which provides direct help to survivors of intimate partner violence. Foster commended Dell’s “‘soup to nuts’-style research, taking innovative ideas and then building teams to truly move the needle. This style of work is both a hallmark of Cornell Bowers CIS and Cornell Tech.”

Steve Jackson is a professor of information science and science and technology studies whose work applies a social science lens to developments in technology. Jackson has long been a leader in the areas of infrastructure studies and maintenance studies. Most recently, Jackson’s research has explored "computing on earth," with a focus on the ecological impact of computing. “He looks at interactions between citizen and state, between vendor and consumer, between haves and have nots, and he identifies new roadmaps for the thoughtful development of technology in our lives,” Foster said in announcing Jackson’s award. “Steve is one of our stars: a leading scholar who truly brings an interdisciplinary and human-centered approach to his work—very much the spirit of Bowers CIS.”

Thorsten Joachims is a professor of computer science and information science and associate dean for research in Cornell Bowers CIS. A fellow of both the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Joachims is widely recognized as a world leader in the field of machine learning. His early work on text categorization established support vector machines as a go-to method for text classification. While continuing work on related topics in machine learning and data mining, Joachims broadened his scope, making deep investments in recommendation systems, a technology that powers some of the most successful web-based technologies. Joachims is also a leader at Cornell, where he was instrumental in helping create the AI Radical Collaboration and the Cornell AI Initiative.

Kengo Kato is a professor of statistics and data science. Kato is widely known for his work in mathematical statistics, which has applications to many fields, including probability theory, economics, and machine learning. Kato has made path-breaking contributions to a variety of disciplines, solving multiple open problems and winning international awards in the process. His work related to the central limit theorem paved the way in the development of theory-guided inference methods for a broad class of high-dimensional statistical problems. Kato is now branching out with colleagues into new research areas, including notions of sparsity and statistical properties of Wasserstein distance.

Alexandra Silva is a professor of computer science and one of the world leaders in the area of formal verification. She is widely known for her leading work on co-algebraic techniques for modeling of systems. 

“What’s remarkable about Alexandra is that she is not just a theoretician; she also applies these ideas to practical systems,” Foster said, citing Silva’s decade-long collaboration on the NetKAT system with Foster and Dexter Kozen, the Joseph Newton Pew Jr. Professor in Engineering in the Department of Computer Science. He also cited her work applying automata learning to automatically build models of protocols like TCP and QUIC, finding bugs in real-world implementations.

Teaching and Advising Awards

Larry Blume, interim associate dean for education in Cornell Bowers CIS, presented the excellence awards in teaching and advising.

Anne Bracy is a senior lecturer of computer science. She has taught nearly every computer science undergraduate major, introduced innovative methods to her classrooms, and shared them with colleagues in the Department of Computer Science. “Her evals are off the charts,” Blume said in announcing Bracy’s award. “She is an extremely active mentor and maintains contact with a large network of alumni.”  During her time at Cornell, Bracy has received the Tau Beta Pi Professor of the Year award (2019), the College of Engineering Excellence in Teaching Award (2017), and the Association of Computer Science Undergraduates’ Faculty of the Year award (2015-2016).

Joe Guinness is an associate professor of statistics and data science and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Statistics and Data Science. An expert in modeling and analysis of large spatial-temporal datasets – particularly with applications in earth sciences – Guinness leads “Introduction to R Programming” (STSCI 2120/5120) and “Statistical Computing” (STSCI 4520/5520), guides undergraduate-level study courses, and advises on graduate-level research projects.

Karen Levy is an associate professor of information science who has taught six wide-ranging courses over the past six years.One of them is “Choices and Consequences in Computing” (INFO 1260), which she co-teaches with Jon Kleinberg, Tisch University Professor of Computer Science. 

“The material in this class is very abstract, and she and Jon do spectacular work in opening it up to students,” Blume said. The proof, Blume added, is that enrollment for the course jumped nearly 50% – from below 500 to now more than 700 – in the first two years of the course. INFO 1260 is a gateway class to the major, and students often report that this class is what drew them in, Blume said. He cited the remarkably high class evaluations for INFO 1260 and another course Levy teaches – “Surveillance and Privacy” (INFO 4250).

Phoebe Sengers is a professor of information science who developed “Designing Technology for Social Impact” (INFO 4240), a course that Blume called a “key class in the information science design track.” The course covers what and how values can be embodied in design. Student work includes extensive readings, design workbooks and design mini-projects that exercise the design concepts students learn in the class. Starting with 38 students in its first run, it is now Information Science’s fifth largest course, Blume said, noting that students have called the course "transformative."

Robbert van Renesse is a professor of computer science who has made substantial intellectual contributions to the development of teaching methods for operating systems. Van Renesse has renovated the core course, CS 4410/5410 and its practicum, CS 4411/5411, and is developing a book around this material. “Van Renesse has had an amazing impact on how operating systems are taught today at Cornell and how the entire computer science department handles examinations,” wrote a nominating colleague.

Artificial intelligence-powered writing assistants that autocomplete sentences or offer “smart replies” not only put words into people’s mouths, they also put ideas into their heads, according to new research.

Maurice Jakesch, a doctoral student in the field of information science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science asked more than 1,500 participants to write a paragraph answering the question, “Is social media good for society?” People who used a writing assistant that was biased for or against social media were twice as likely to write a paragraph agreeing with the AI, and significantly more likely to say they held the same opinion, compared to people who wrote without an AI’s help.

The study suggests that the biases baked into AI writing tools – whether intentional or unintentional – could have concerning repercussions for culture and politics, the researchers said.

“We’re rushing to implement these AI models in all walks of life, but we need to better understand the implications,” said co-author Mor Naaman, professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and of information science at Cornell Bowers CIS.  “Apart from increasing efficiency and creativity, there could be other consequences for individuals and also for our society – shifts in language and opinions.”

While others have looked at how large language models, like ChatGPT, can create persuasive ads and political messages, this is the first study to show that the process of writing with an AI can sway a person’s opinions. Jakesch presented the study, “Co-Writing with Opinionated Language Models Affects Users’ Views,” at the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in April, where the paper received an honorable mention.

To understand how people interact with AI writing assistants, Jakesch steered a large language model to have either a positive or negative opinion of social media. Participants wrote a paragraph – alone or with one of the opinionated assistants – on a platform he built that mimics a social media website. The platform collects data from participants as they type, such as which suggestions from the AI they accept, and how long they take to compose the paragraph.

People who co-wrote with the pro-social media AI assistant composed more sentences arguing that social media is good, and vice versa, compared to participants without a writing assistant, as determined by independent judges. These participants also were more likely to profess their AI’s opinion in a follow-up survey.

The researchers explored the possibility that people were simply accepting the AI’s suggestions to complete the task quicker, but even participants who took several minutes to compose their paragraphs came up with heavily influenced statements. The survey revealed that a majority of the participants did not even notice the AI was biased and didn’t realize they were being influenced.

“The process of co-writing doesn’t really feel like I’m being persuaded,” said Naaman. “It feels like I’m doing something very natural and organic – I’m expressing my own thoughts with some aid.”

When repeating the experiment with a different topic, the research team again saw that participants were swayed by the AI. Now, the team is looking into how this experience creates the shift, and how long the effects last.

Just as social media has changed the political landscape by facilitating the spread of misinformation and the formation of echo chambers, biased AI writing tools could produce similar shifts in opinions, depending on which tools users choose. For example, some organizations have announced they plan to develop an alternative to ChatGPT, designed to express more conservative viewpoints.

These technologies deserve more public discussion regarding how they could be misused and how they should be monitored and regulated, the researchers argue.

“The more powerful these technologies become and the more deeply we embed them in the social fabric of our societies,” Jakesch said, “the more careful we might want to be about how we’re governing the values, priorities, and opinions built into them.”

Advait Bhat from Microsoft Research, Daniel Buschek of the University of Bayreuth, and Lior Zalmanson of Tel Aviv University contributed to the paper.

Support for the work came from the National Science Foundation, the German National Academic Foundation, and the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and the Arts.

By Patricia Waldron, a writer for the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.

Cornell researchers have developed a robot called ReMotion that occupies physical space on a remote user’s behalf, automatically mirroring the user’s movements in real time and conveying key body language that is lost in standard virtual environments.

“Pointing gestures, the perception of another’s gaze, intuitively knowing where someone’s attention is – in remote settings, we lose these nonverbal, implicit cues that are very important for carrying out design activities,” said Mose Sakashita, a doctoral student in the field of information science.

Sakashita is the lead author of “ReMotion: Supporting Remote Collaboration in Open Space with Automatic Robotic Embodiment,” which he presented at the Association for Computing Machinery CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Hamburg, Germany in April. “With ReMotion, we show that we can enable rapid, dynamic interactions through the help of a mobile, automated robot.”

With further development, ReMotion could be deployed in virtual collaborative environments as well as in classrooms and other educational settings, Sakashita said.

The idea for ReMotion came out of Sakashita’s experience as a teaching assistant for a popular rapid prototyping course in the spring 2020 semester, which was held largely online due to COVID-19. Confined with students to a virtual learning environment, Sakashita came to understand that physical movement is vital in collaborative design projects: teammates lean in to survey parts of the prototype; they inspect circuits, troubleshoot faulty code together and then may draw up solutions on a nearby whiteboard.

This range of motion is all but lost in a virtual environment, as are the subtle ways collaborators communicate through body language and expressions, he said.

“It was super challenging to teach. There are so many tasks that are involved when you're doing a hands-on design activity,” Sakashita said. “The kind of instinctive, dynamic transitions we make – like gesturing or addressing a collaborator – are too dynamic to simulate through Zoom.”

The lean, nearly six-foot-tall ReMotion device itself is outfitted with a monitor for a head, omnidirectional wheels for feet and game-engine software for brains. It automatically mirrors the remote user’s movements – thanks to another Cornell-made device, Neckface, which the remote user wears to track head and body movements. The motion data is then sent remotely to the ReMotion robot in real-time. 

Telepresence robots are not new, but remote users generally need to steer them manually, distracting from the task at hand, researchers said. Other options such as virtual reality and mixed reality collaboration can also require an active role from the user and headsets may limit peripheral awareness, researchers added.

In a small study of about a dozen participants, nearly all reported a heightened sense of co-presence and behavioral interdependence when using ReMotion compared to an existing telerobotic system. Participants also reported significantly higher shared attention among remote collaborators.

In its current form, ReMotion only works with two users in a one-on-one remote environment, and each user must occupy physical spaces of identical size and layout. In future work, ReMotion developers intend to explore asymmetrical scenarios, like a single remote team member collaborating virtually via ReMotion with multiple teammates in a larger room.

Other co-authors are: Ruidong Zhang and Hyunju Kim, doctoral students in the field of information science; Xiaoyi Li, M.P.S. ’21; Michael Russo, M.P.S. ‘21; Cheng Zhang, assistant professor of information science; Malte Jung, associate professor of information science and the Nancy H. ’62 and Philip M. ’62 Young Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow; and François Guimbretière, professor of information science.

This research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the Nakajima Foundation.

Louis DiPietro is a writer for the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.